Common Desktop Environment

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The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a proprietary desktop environment for UNIX, based on the Motif widget toolkit. It is also the standard desktop environment on HP OpenVMS.

CDE was jointly developed by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell and Sun Microsystems in The Open Group. It was based on HP's VUE (Visual User Environment).

Until about 2000, CDE was considered the de facto standard for UNIX desktops, but at that time, free software desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME were quickly becoming mature, and became almost universal on the Linux platform, which already had a larger user base than most commercial Unixes in total.

In 2001, commercial Unix vendors Hewlett-Packard (HP-UX) and Sun Microsystems (Solaris) announced that they would phase out CDE as the standard desktop on their workstations, in favor of GNOME. However, in April 2003, HP reportedly opted to return to CDE, as GNOME had not stabilised sufficiently for their preference. It has been suggested that the non-frozen APIs were the main complaint.

As of early 2006, Solaris 10, from Sun, includes both CDE and the GNOME-based Java Desktop System. Sun has gone on record stating that CDE will not be part of OpenSolaris.[link]

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